Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The fashion industry has suffered from irresponsible manufacturing, consumption and disposal practices leading to huge amounts of waste generated. Circular supply chain (CSC) has been a recent approach to change our business models to address the issues of waste reduction and effectively use our resources. A fashion CSC aims to keep clothes, textiles and fibers at their highest value during use and then create pathways to re-enter the economy after use, never entering the waste stream. Therefore, for a supply chain (SC) to become truly circular, every party in the SC has to be equally involved, starting with the design and development team to manufacturing and consumers. This study, through a concept paper approach, seeks to explore ways in which a fashion company can educate all parties to align everyone along one common goal of achieving circularity. Given marketing is a tool used by companies to inform, remind and persuade stakeholders, the goal of this study was to identify the major stakeholders in a supply chain and suggest areas where internal and external marketing need to focus on for members to actively participate in the fashion CSC. For internal marketing, CSC initiatives should emphasize that all parties in the SC are taking steps to ensure that the product they are offering has the potential to be circular. For external marketing, the company must educate consumers about the negative impacts of the industry, about how their product life can be extended, and how to dispose their products to ensure circularity.